considerations ad infinitum

It had always been tough for him to do anything without a second and sometimes third guess. Paralysis by analysis - some tool at work used to call it...and in many cases, he blamed this, his higher order thinking - as he called it, for his failings in life. There were times, now, as a married man that he sat in silence with his wife, whom he loved conversing with, because he did not want to say something that could be interpreted as incorrect under any light. Only truths and so on. And so he would sit, not talking, which means not responding to whatever she had said, question or not, and think carefully about the appropriate and most accurate next thing to say (e.g., like a mathematician) and by the time he actually had that next thing in the back of mouth ready to be uttered, it’d be over and just an afterthought and not worth saying at all. His entire life was slowing down, like this, and because of this and he notices it and watches it wash all over him and does nothing, except think about it of course...and the cycle continues because now his thoughts are not just contained within the realm of insecure justification of his next best thing to say but also are, the thoughts, considerations now of the fact that he is actually spending time considering whether he should say certain things in certain ways or not and this is a time consuming mental activity in and of itself. And efficiency is not so much just lost but eviscerated. And so faced with an opportunity to engage in conversation, he instead first, he turns the crank at the front of his brain to get it started but also considers carefully the very fact that he is actually turning the crank at the front of his brain in the first place which leads to a consideration of the question, “why must I turn this crank?” but also whether or not "crank" is the correct term to use in this context and then more broadly whether the analogical connection between automobile and brain is appropriate, etc. All the while his wife has by this time left the room, saying something like “I love talking to myself.”

Some catastrophic-,-oh-god-take-his-clothes-off-and-just-put-him-in-the-shower, retention failure during toilet training, we're sure of that at this point at least.